Four Words She Uses All the Time

Autonomy. Justice. Non-maleficence. Beneficence.

“I use those four basic principles of bioethics all the time!” said Barbara Bollier, a retired anesthesiologist, former Kansas State Senator, and longtime Center for Practical Bioethics volunteer and Legacy Society member.

“Of anything I’ve used as a guide in life, it’s those four words, coupled with my faith,” she said.

A Perfect Fit

Barbara’s involvement with the Center started – as so many introductions to nonprofit organizations do – with an invitation from a friend in the 1990s to attend an event.

“The mission of the Center fit perfectly into what my husband Rene, a family practice physician, and I believe about the intersection of medicine, ethics and law,” she said.

Barbara and donated and attended Center events. Then, in 2000, Myra Christopher, founding president and CEO, took Barbara to lunch.

“I have five things that you could do for the Center,” Myra said to her, “and you need to pick one.”

Barbara picked a three-year commitment to chair the Center’s Pediatric Palliative Care Initiative. Her plan to take a yearlong sabbatical from her medical practice turned into retirement and more than two decades of volunteer and financial support for the Center.

The Pediatric Palliative Care Initiative concluded with four major next step recommendations. Barbara led the one to develop a youth-friendly version of Caring Conversations, the Center’s workbook guide to advance care planning.

“We targeted 16-year old kids in Kansas and Missouri,” said Barbara, “because 16 is when kids get their driver’s license and are asked, maybe for the first time, to think about being an organ donor and what that implies.”

Barbara presented Caring Conversations workshops for young people anywhere she had the opportunity to speak in the community and also taught bioethics to medical students at Kansas City University. She was so committed to the Center as a volunteer that she even had a business card.

State Senator

Barbara was attending a Center-sponsored symposium in November 2009 when she picked up a newspaper and learned that the Republican state representative for her district, Terrie Huntington, had just been appointed to the Kansas Senate.

She made a bee line for Myra Christopher and former Center board char Joan Berkley, who both lived in the district, to ask if they had seen the article and who they thought they should try to get to take her place?

“You should!” they both said.

Barbara represented the 25th Kansas House district from 2010 to 2012, and the 21st district from 2013 to 2017. She won her race for the Kansas Senate 7th district in 2016 and was succeeded in 2021 by Ethan Corson.

Barbara’s knowledge and experience gained from her work at the Center and from teaching bioethics were valuable resources in her legislative work.

“Those principles of bioethics – autonomy, justice, non-maleficence and beneficence – don’t necessarily have to do with medicine or even health,” she said. “They are basic values to measure anything by, and they really guided me as a legislator.”

Persist in the Truth

“It’s important to me,” she continued, “that the Center maintain itself as a place for practical bioethics.

“I can’t remember the number of times that I reached out to the Center for help in evaluating bills from a bioethics standpoint and to better understand potential planned and unplanned outcomes of legislation that we might or might not move forward.”

Retirement in Tabernash, Colorado, hasn’t lessened Barbara and Rene’s support for the Center or their strong belief in its mission and values.

Asked what advice she could offer the Center as it navigates today’s polarized social and political environment, she said: “Persist in the truth!

“The law should never be politicized and neither should health.”

By Trudi Galblum